Friday, July 31, 2015

Israeli Physician Talks About Meeting Aliens: What's in it for us? What's in it for them?

(This is the English translation of Part II of the two-part series "Meeting Aliens," authored by Israeli physician, inventor and creative human, Dr. Yuval Rabinovich. The website that published the original Hebrew version is HaYadan, which may be accessed by clicking here. The English translation of Part I of the series, 'Why we have never met aliens" was published by JewishPress.com .)

It
could have been very nice if an intelligent species would have
contacted us. We could cooperate in outer space research, with deeper
understanding of the forces that mold our joint world. They might
help us use nuclear power in a non-harmful way. We may contribute
advanced metallurgy. Who knows?

If
an intelligent creature would ever want to contact us, it is likely
to be wise enough to find out how we treat our surrounding beings. On
this point we not only have a questionable past, but also a present.
In his book "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" (2014),
Yuval Harari explains how Man has wiped out all large animals which
could not be directly exploited. After this, he turns against his own
kind.

The
built-in racism in Man was used to justify cultural and physical
genocide of groups of people. The attackers and the victims were not
genetically far apart from each other. The Spanish conquistadors
easily massacred native Central Americans and South Americans. The
Europeans easily enslaved Africans. They did not feel close to each
other. Nor did the Hutu and Tutsi people in Africa feel close to each
other, a factor that may have been significant when violence erupted
again in Africa. But the deadly hostility of Christians toward Jews
cannot be a function of genetic distance; it is rather one of
cultural diversity only. Even less understandable is the joy of
violence between Catholic and Protestant Christians. Nowadays the
world is astonished by the sight of Sunni Muslims massacring
everybody, including Shiite Muslims, and at least one incident of
Sunnis killing other Sunnis in the name of Sunni Islam.

For
further reading about the history of racism in pseudo-scientific
literature I highly recommend Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 book, "The
Mismeasure of Man".

We
like nothing more than grading: who is the wealthiest person on
earth? Who is the fastest runner? Who jumps the highest? The record
holders are highly appreciated, although I am not sure we can explain
why. We also cooperate: we have sports teams who engage in ceremonial
fighting in which no one is supposed to die, although on some rare
occasions sports team fans do kill each other. Anyway, nothing is
more important to us than competing, even if it does not achieve
anything useful.

We
know of only one case of two intelligent species co-existing on
Earth. One of them did not survive the encounter although we do not
know exactly why. We do not know why Neanderthals perished, and there
is not even a consensus as to when exactly it happened. Estimates
range from 40,000 to 24,000 years ago. One thing we do know: the
Neanderthals – who were not our ancestors but rather a side branch
of the human family tree – became completely extinct. We also know
they preceded our ancestors, the Cro-Magnons in Europe. This is the
only case we know of an encounter between two intelligent species.
The weaker did not survive.

Bearing
this in mind, we went out looking for aliens. In 1960 astrophysicist
Frank Drake started the Ozma project. This is the same Frank Drake
whose equation for estimating the number of intelligent civilizations
in outer space was discussed in my previous article. In this project,
a radio telescope was used to try and detect intelligent radio
signals from nearby stars for four months.

In
1972 and 1973, two small spacecrafts were launched, each carrying
messages to aliens. These were Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space ships
and the messages carried were designed by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan
(the late Carl Sagan was an American astronomer who had a great role
in popularising astronomy, through means such as his TV series
"Cosmos"). At the same time, project "Ozma 2" was
launched; alien radio transmission were searched for four years.
Nowadays a few projects to search for radio messages from space are
ongoing; millions of radio channels are scanned non-stop and analyzed
by universities and by people in a joint effort called SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) -- so far, to no
avail.

Each
Pioneer spacecraft carried with it a gold-plated aluminum plaque with
messages carved on it. Let us examine a few of these messages. We
will ignore the fact that the drawn images correspond to the ideal
American beauty and not of average people. We will also ignore the
question of whether aliens can understand that two dimensional
carving represents three dimensional bodies and creatures. We will
focus on the messages themselves.

The
man raises his hand in what seems to be a universal gesture of peace.
We consider it as a message of peace because he does not carry any
weapon. This message can only be understood by another violent
creature. At the bottom of the plaque we see a schematic drawing of
the sun and planets as was perceived by people in the seventies of
the twentieth century. Pluto was still regarded a planet and only
Saturn had rings. But we will ignore these inaccuracies for the
following item: from the third planet, Earth, an arrow points to the
Pioneer spacecraft that was launched from it. Excuse me. An arrow?
What is an arrow? It is our intuitive way to mark a direction. For
this we use a symbol of an aerodynamic weapon. We grew up. We no
longer use arrows but rather missiles with the same structure.

To
summarize, we are a very successful species. We wiped out almost all
large animals, except those we found useful as a food source or as
working beasts. The only intelligent creature we ever met did not
survive. After that we started killing our own, justifying it in the
ways in which they differ from us. We are also eager to meet aliens.
We are still the masters in using aerodynamic weapons but our
intentions are peaceful.